Debugging
Restart Your Graphics Driver Without Rebooting
When Unreal hangs your GPU or your display goes black, you can recover in seconds with no reboot. The Windows keyboard shortcut Win+Ctrl+Shift+B restarts the graphics driver on the fly.
gpugraphics-driverwindowscrash-recovery
Working with Unreal, especially in nDisplay or with heavy shader compilation, can occasionally lock up the GPU. Before reaching for the power button, try the built-in Windows recovery shortcut.
The Shortcut
Win + Ctrl + Shift + B: the screen briefly flickers and you hear a beep. Everything recovers immediately.
What It Does
- Signals Windows to reset the GPU driver stack (WDDM reset)
- The display goes black for ~1 second, then returns to normal
- Running applications are not killed; Unreal Editor stays open
- Safe to use repeatedly; no known side effects
When to Use It
- Display goes black or freezes after a GPU crash in Unreal
- Artifacts appear on screen after a TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) event
- Driver gets into a bad state after a shader compile spike
- Any time the display is unresponsive but the machine is still running
This trick has saved me from a full reboot more times than I can count during nDisplay testing sessions. It works on all Windows 10/11 machines regardless of GPU vendor.